Improve your chance at finding work through Personal Branding

Today I'm going to give away some very valuable information: How to improve your chance at finding work through personal branding. What is Personal Branding and how to do it?

It’s a relatively new topic and it’s about to hit Australia, with a good handful of professional SEO consultants jumping on board. The true definition of personal branding is the ability to market yourselves to others. I’m going to use myself as an example in this article and give you inside secrets on how I went from unknown to being head hunted.

Believe In Your Brand = Believe In Yourself!

If you’re like me and love the TV show Parks and Recreation, then you will definitely know Tom and Donna with their “Treat Yo Self” day. Now think of Personal Branding to be similar to this, where you simply take a day to indulge in yourself: I call it the very creative name Brand Yo Self.

There are a number of ways you can do this, and I suggest the first step above everything is to start writing down a list of skills you have in your field, also variation of your job title. As an example, my skills are online marketing and search engine optimisation, so I would start by writing out my list:

SEO Consultant

Online Marketing Consultant

SEO Consultant Sydney

Online Marketing Consultant Sydney

This list of skills and job title variation is your starting point for the keywords you will need. More about keywords towards the bottom of the article and how to research them on a professional scale.

Now what would happen if you Google search “SEO Specialist Sydney”? You're most likely going to find this website right up there: “I’m Australian, so this would most likely occur if you search from Australia”. It’s not an accident that I rank on the first page with SEO and Online Marketing job titles, even though I don’t actually contain those keywords in my URL.

Analysis on the keyword Personal Branding in SEMRush

Personal Branding is nothing more than search engine optmisation and marketing yourself online. When you’re looking for work, this is becoming the best possible option to take as employers these days will often do a search online before putting a listing in Seek and being bombarded with irrelevant request/resumes.

I didn't start ranking until November 2013, but by then I had already moved into the specialist position I always wanted thanks to outreach, however, since November 2013 I've had an overwhelming amount of job offers without me actually lifting a finger to look for work. I’m very happy where I am and also running my own business on the side, although I wish someone would have shared this information with me earlier.

Of course not all unemployed people are going to have a few hundred dollars to invest into Personal Branding, so I’m going to show you how to get started for FREE! Oh yeah…

First of all, you should be using social media platforms and making them public. If you’re posting drunk pictures of yourself on Facebook profile, then you should probably learn about custom privacy settings and make those pictures only available to your friends.

http://twitter.com

http://linkedin.com

http://plus.google.com

http://facebook.com

Secondly, here is a list of sites you should be using to get you started. Once you register to these then you can start linking them to your social profiles and vise versa. It's important to link them because it tells search engines that it's you.

https://www.vizify.com/

http://www.hirepulse.com.au/

http://www.freelancer.com.au/

https://brandyourself.com/

Once you've done the social media thing and the online resumes, then it’s time to start a blog/website. Some excellent blogging platforms to get you started are listed below. The idea of a website/blog is to rank above everything else, so link to your website/blog from your social media and resume accounts.

http://wordpress.com

http://soup.io

http://imcreator.com/

http://tumblr.com

I know it's a bit confusing, which is why I made a flow chart for you to understand and visualise it easier. To be honest, you can do it as you please, this is just an example of how you could link them together. The point is you have a strategy in place and you follow it through.

Once you have everything registered and your content filled in, you can start optimising your platforms to assist you with your profession. The trick is to link to your blog from your resume profiles and social media profiles using the keyword of your profession. So if you’re a freelance graphic designer based in Melbourne, then you should start linking to your blog using the anchor text “Melbourne Graphic Designer” or “Freelance Graphic Designer Australia”. This way when people do a Google search using that keyword, your website/blog will be listed. Another great option is to link your Google Plus account to your website.

There are a number of ways to conduct keyword research, and the best – most affordable – way I've discovered is using a program called Marketing Samurai: download the trial version. That is your starting point and the program will point out what keywords are the best to start using and how much value you'll get out of them. Choose the lower competition keywords first to build authority to your domain. If you're a bit lost, you can follow the video tutorial in the Dojo (Marketing Samurai Website).

Of course this is not going to happen overnight, you will need to make the first moves by putting yourself out there: directing people to your branding profiles, social media accounts and blog articles. Once you start adding more content into your blog then it will start establishing a topic: if you’re a graphic designer, don’t blog about traffic laws, it will just confuse search engines. You can also contact me to do a 1 month SEO campaign to rank you higher, just to get you started.

Once you establish yourself, I highly recommend upgrading all your profiles and sites to professional subscriptions and hiring someone like me to do a full SEO campaign that will boost your visibility, that’s when you will start to shine! Register a personal domain name and get some business cards with your websites URL in it. Hand them out to everyone and anyone you think will benefit from having it. Remember, you're the product, so making yourself needed is how you create demand.

Of course if you want this done on an industrial scale, then you can hire me.

I hope this helps. Good luck!

Feel free to leave some comments below if you have any questions. I'm always willing to help out.